The Empire Strikes Back Archives

Vintage food collectors will often comment on the extreme scarcity of Star Wars food packaging that they’re able to find years later. While many saved highly-publicized Star Wars food premiums that were advertised with purchase of food items, few thought to save the actual packaging. As a result, there are still to this day many rare, one-of-a-kind, and unknown-to-still-exist Star Wars food items. As collectors, one way we are able to learn what was made is through these ads in magazines, newspapers, and comics from the period.

KP Outer Spacers was a corned-based snack food which the British call “crisps” and Americans correctly call “chips”. These snacks were shaped like spaceships, so it was well suited as a Star Wars promotion. This started in early 1978 shortly after the release of Star Wars in the United Kingdom and offered a mail away Star Wars “Fighter Kite”, made by the British toy company, Palitoy. The offer required kids to send in 3 wrappers and 95p to receive a kite, reducing the number of intact bags saved to this day. The promotion appeared on three different flavors of KP Outer Spacers: beef burger, chutney, and pickled onion.

The KP Outer Spacers promotion was advertised in various Star Wars comics such as the March 4, 1989 issue of 2000AD (a British science fiction comic) and in the Marvel Star Wars Weekly comic from February 29, 1978. Marvel’s Star Wars comic, which was monthly series in the United States, was published in a weekly series in Britain.

KP Outer Spacers bags are next to impossible to find, but here’s an example of a bag of chutney flavoured [sic] chips with the Star Wars Fighter Kite offer details. This is also a rare example of a food promotion where even the premium is super difficult to come by!

Nabisco launched the first cereal promotion in Britain on boxes of Shreddies cereal. In this case, the premium is the packaging, as each box contained a small sheet of Letraset stickers of Star Wars characters that could be affixed onto the back of 4 different Star Wars scenes on the box backs.

The Shreddies offer was promoted in various UK comics such as the June 17, 1978 issue of Tiger and the May 24, 1978 issue of Star Wars Weekly.

The Shreddies offer appeared on 10 ounce and 15 ounce boxes of Shreddies cereal, so with 4 different scenes on the box backs, there are 8 different Shreddies Star Wars boxes to collect!

Coca Cola ran a massive campaign in Japan for the release of the first Star Wars film. Jonathan McElwain wrote an extensive blog article on the Star Wars Coca Cola promotion in Japan that I’d highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about this fascinating Coca Cola promotion. One of the places where this was advertised was in the July 2, 1978 issue of Weekly Shōnen, a weekly manga comic that is popular in Japan.

Each Coca Cola product brand (Coca Cola, Fanta Orange, Fanta Grape, Fanta Apple, Sprite, Fanta Club Soda, and Fanta Golden Grape) had 50 different bottle caps. Bottles were also sold in six packs with two different six pack trays: one with C-3PO, Luke Skywalker, and Ben Kenobi, and another with the Escape pod.

Some American Star Wars collectors might be surprised to learn that there was a Nestlé’s Quik Star Wars food tie-in. Well, not exactly. Nestlé, which offered Star Wars jewelry mail away premiums on wrappers of their candy bars, also did a newspaper campaign for Kenner toys, which included the Star Wars large size action figures and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter vehicles. Unlike other Quik food promotions, as far as I know, this promotion never reached the actual Quik cans, but here is an image of a similar Quik can for a toy promotion from 13 years earlier for a British boy band using a can label design that has remained largely unchanged over those years.

Kraft brought Letraset stickers back for The Empire Strikes Back in a Dairylea cheese promotion in the United Kingdom. There were four different Dairylea cheese spread boxes, each containing a different black and white Star Wars scene on the back of the container. Kids could find a small sheet of Letraset stickers inside the box that could be used to add characters and objects to the scene. This was advertised in the Marvel adaptation for The Empire Strikes Back in the Star Wars Weekly issue for May 29, 1980. Kids could also mail away for an Empire Strikes Back “bumper transfer pack” that contained additional Letraset stickers. This Marvel issue also included a small Letraset sheet for this Kraft Dairylea series.

Kraft would later go on to do another Dairylea cheese promotion for the Droids and Ewoks cartoons in the mid 1980s with different characters appearing on cheese wedges.

For Return of the Jedi, Amora offered Star Wars glasses in jars of Dijon mustard in France. This promotion was advertised in the Franco-Belgian comic, Spirou.

There were four different Star Wars glasses to collect: Chewbacca and Ewok, “Dark Vador” and Troopers, “Luc” and Dark Vader, and Luc and Yoda.

The Hi-C promotion for Return of the Jedi included a mail away offer for Return of the Jedi t-shirts and caps. This was advertised in newspapers and directly on drink labels. Kids could send 3 quality seal labels from any Hi-C drink plus $3.99 or $3.25 for the t-shirt or hat, respectively.

Labels and intact Hi-C cans are surprisingly difficult to track down. Even though the small rectangular quality seal was the only portion of the label that needed to mailed in, even partial labels were not often saved. This Return of the Jedi promotion appeared on 11 different flavors of Hi-C drinks. Looking at the three labels above, only the orange and grape drinks state “All Natural Flavors”, which tells you everything you need to know about Fruit Punch.

Possibly the most obscure food promotion from the vintage years was conducted by Doriana in Argentina. Over many years, Doriana has created collectible margarine containers for popular comic characters, superheroes, Disney characters, sports figures, and more. The concept is illustrated in this ad where kids are encouraged to cut out the character on the container lid along with a small plastic strip underneath it to make a stand. Needless to say, this tended to cause many of the container lids to be destroyed.

Here are two examples of fully intact Doriana margarine lids for “Wicket the Ewok” and “Imperial Scout”. The Imperial Scout (or Biker Scout) also includes the original Doriana margarine container.

One of the last Return of the Jedi food promotions occurred in Finland from 1984-1985 for Star Wars themed licorice and fruit candy, as indicated by the dates of these comic book covers. The back covers of these comics had full color ads where kids could mail away for 1 of 5 different flavors of these Star Wars candy boxes.

Here’s an example of one of the Halva licorice boxes. All the candy boxes featured Darth Vader on the front with 9 different images of Star Wars characters and spaceship card art on the back.

One of the most elusive food promos occurred in Sweden in 1984 for Hemglass ice cream. Hemglass “Star Mint” and “Big Star” popsicles could be bought from local ice cream vendors driving around the neighborhood in Hemglass trucks as depicted in the lower right hand corner of this ad in an issue of “The Phantom” comic. To date, I have never found nor have seen any packaging related to this food promotion, so it’s fair to call it a Phantom menace.

A little known cereal tie-in in 1985 appeared on covers of the Marvel’s Return of the Jedi weekly comic in the UK. As was standard in the day, toy premiums would occasionally get attached to the covers of these comics, literally taped onto the front. Two of the promotions were for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, one in March 1985 for dinosaur 3D cards, and another in August 1985 for plastic plane models. Obviously, these premiums had nothing to do with Star Wars, but their placement on the Return of the Jedi made them canon!

This month’s item from the Imperial Archives features the story of a vintage Star Wars Kenner toy that never was, but this prototype of an unproduced rifle shows it was apparently considered for release in 1980.

This toy is a hardcopy, meaning it was hand-cast from a silicone mold using a two-part urethane (unlike production toys which are made from steel molds using injected plastic). It’s hand-painted, with a hand-applied photographic logo sticker, and it includes bespoke electronic components. Pulling the rear trigger activates a motor, creating a whining sound effect and lighting up a kaleidoscope contained in the gun’s sight. Squeezing the front trigger mechanically alters the kaleidoscopic view and decreases the motor’s speed, changing the pitch of the sound effect.

Before this item turned up, about two decades after it was made, Star Wars toy collectors didn’t know it existed. Kenner had never solicited the toy for sale, so it never appeared in a catalog or on a product list; there were no known photos of it, and no Kenner employee had been known to mention it. It doesn’t look much like any weapon in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back; the only indication that it has anything at all to do with Star Wars is the paper Empire label hand-glued to the toy.

When we bought it, the primary reason we had to believe that it was really an unproduced Star Wars toy prototype was the excellent reputation of the seller, The Earth Collectible Toy Mall in Cincinnati. As that city was the longtime home of Kenner, a stunning number of prototype toys had come to The Earth from Kenner employees over the years, so we believed that this probably was a real Star Wars toy, but we nevertheless wished we had some hard evidence.

A couple years later, Lisa was looking through an auction lot of items being sold by someone whose father had worked on the Star Wars line at Kenner. The lot consisted largely of paperwork, though Lisa was drawn to a set of photographs that wouldn’t have attracted the attention of virtually anyone else:

These photographs show the wood pattern for our mysterious gun. A wood pattern is essentially the original sculpt of a toy—a one-of-a-kind piece of original art that would then be duplicated to create the finished toy. In this case, the wood pattern would have been used to create the silicone molds that were then used to create our hardcopy. Sadly, the person who sold us the photos didn’t have the pattern, but at least we now had independent evidence connecting this rifle to Kenner’s Star Wars line.

But the best was yet to come. A while after that, we had the opportunity to purchase some artwork from former Kenner designer Steve Hodges, and among the pieces he had were these drawings from August 1978:

While none of the drawings that Steve had saved precisely match our rifle, their design style unmistakably matches that of our gun, so we asked Steve about it. He recalled that Kenner was contemplating a follow-up to their Laser Pistol (based on Han Solo’s blaster) and Laser Rifle (based on the standard-issue Stormtrooper weapon), but lacking solid reference for any other movie guns, they asked Steve to come up with a handful of original designs. And it appears that a year or two later, one such design made it all the way to hardcopy stage before being cancelled. Perhaps Lucasfilm balked at the non-movie design, or perhaps cost analysis or some other internal factor killed the project—we likely will never know, unless some bit of paperwork happens to turn up someday—but at least we have this evidence of a vintage Kenner Star Wars toy that never was.

Tag: The Empire Strikes Back

Vintage Food Collectors Have Discovered A Lot From Star Wars Food Ads!

A Vintage Star Wars Kenner Toy That Never Was…